One common concern when transmitting pre-encoded video data is how to adapt pre-encoded video into communication channels that have different bandwidths. Most of the pre-encoded video streams are encoded with very high bit rates to ensure high-quality video. Transmitting such high bit rate video streams is usually expensive and sometimes infeasible since the communication channel cannot provide enough bandwidth. A common approach to reduce a pre-encoded video bit rate is to decode the video to generate raw pixel data first, and then re-encode the raw pixel data at a different bit rate. However, this method of simple re-encoding is expensive in terms of complexity and cost, and may introduce a delay resulting from the frame reordering. It needs one decoder and one fully functional encoder to re-encode video data. Furthermore, since the encoder needs to perform a motion search again and make new encoding decisions (e.g. picture coding types, macroblock modes and quantization parameters) based on the decoded data, the video quality generally will degrade significantly, in an effect known as generation loss or cascade coding loss.
Another approach to reduce pre-encoded video bit rates is to use a transcoding system that reuses some of the original coding decisions. However, if such a transcoding system uses one or more traditional rate control algorithms, such as the motion pictures experts group-2 test model 5 (MPEG2 TM5) rate control algorithm, the quality of the transcoded video generally will still suffer from degradation due to a number of factors. One factor is a potential difference between the rate control parameters used by the source system and those used by the transcoding system. Another factor is the presence of impairments, such as quantization loss, in the original pre-encoded streams that are not considered by the transcoding system. Additionally, the algorithms used by these types of transcoding systems are computational expensive and inefficient because they often need prior knowledge of the coding type of a group of pictures, and this information may not be available beforehand. Furthermore, a large buffer is often utilized to extract this information, and a large processing delay can be introduced. These common transcoding systems also may need to calculate an activity indication of every macroblock in a picture, and often need feedbacks from the entropy encoding module for every macroblock.
Given these limitations, as discussed, it is apparent that an improved rate control method for transcoding of pre-encoded video data would be advantageous.